I killed them all.
I sacrificed their lives. Offered their blood like it meant nothing. And for what? My comrades. My friends. The only people who had ever been anything to me. What sin did I commit, beings of light? You who cursed me to this destiny. What purpose lies in saving a world of sinners when I am its heir? What kind of joke is this world?
The kingdom was celebrating.
Princess Selena's seventeenth birthday. Lanterns strung between buildings like false stars, warm and orange and obscene. Music from somewhere he couldn't see. Laughter from everywhere he could.
He moved through it like a wound the crowd hadn't noticed yet.
His hair was long and black and matted, falling across his face in strands that had stopped being separate things a long time ago. His skin was pale in the way that skin goes pale when warmth has been absent long enough to become a default. The scars on his wrists, his ankles, the ones that crossed his arms and torso in patterns too deliberate to be accidental. Visible to anyone who looked.
No one looked.
He had learned early that the world does not see what it has decided not to see. And he had learned even earlier that this was not cruelty. It was convenience. They were not blind. They were comfortable. There is a difference and it is worse.
His eyes moved through the crowd the way they always moved. Cold. Mapping. The baker handing bread to a child who had never once wondered where the next meal would come from. The merchant counting coins with the easy satisfaction of a man who had never felt hunger reshape his thoughts. The nobles in their finery, not performing wealth so much as inhabiting it, wearing it the way he wore his scars. Naturally, without thought, because it was simply what they were.
He had been cold in ways that leave marks that don't fade. He had been hungry in ways that change the architecture of the mind permanently. He had worked with hands that were too small for the tools he was given, and the callouses were still there, would always be there, carved into his palms like a record the world had written without his permission.
And here they were. Celebrating.
The crowd parted ahead of him and he saw her.
Selena.
She moved through the celebration the way light moves. Not forcing anything, not needing to. Silver hair catching the lantern glow. A dress that had been made for exactly this moment. Eyes that had never once looked at the world and found it capable of the things it had done to him.
Everything she was, he had never been allowed to be.
Everything she had, he had been denied before he was old enough to know what denial meant.
His hands closed at his sides. Slowly. The way they closed when something needed to be contained.
How convenient. How perfectly, obscenely convenient. She will inherit a kingdom. She will stand in the light they built for her and smile and know nothing. Nothing. Of what it costs to exist in the world they decided she deserved and I didn't.
I pray that you destroy it. I pray that everything they gave you burns. Whatever god or demon is still listening to someone like me. Grant me only this one thing. Let her be the one who tears it all down. Before my death. Before I disappear into the nothing they always intended for me. Let this rotten world feel something for once.
The music kept playing. The laughter kept coming. The festival continued with the complete indifference of something that had made its peace with his suffering long before he had.
The lanterns blurred.
The faces became shapes. The laughter became pressure, something that built behind his eyes and his teeth and the base of his skull until there was no space left for the cold discipline he had spent years constructing just to stay upright.
Every scar burned.
Every memory pressed forward at once. The first winter, the alley, the rags, the chains, the sound a body makes when it has been pushed past the point where it can pretend. All of it rising together into something that had no name and needed none.
It swelled.
And swelled.
And then there was nothing.
When he opened his eyes the ceiling was white.
He stared at it without moving, the way he had learned to wake. Still, silent, cataloguing the room before announcing himself to whatever was in it.
White walls. Polished floors. Sheets against his skin softer than anything he had ever slept on.
His hands moved before he decided to move them. Fingers finding the scars on his wrists automatically. Still there. Still his. The room could be whatever it wanted to be. That map did not change.
A voice. Calm. Measured. Somewhere to his left.
Unknown: "Oh. You're finally awake."
I will also be posting this story on RoyalRoad.com under the account CursedMind